Sunday, January 27, 2013

There are croissant flakes in my tea...

Yesterday I went to the town of Avignon and visited Palais des Papes (Palace of the Popes). What a beautiful place it was. Note: It's part of Provence, you know, the region with all of the Lavender? Montpellier is part of Languedoc Roussillon.
 Here's a photo I took of the city from inside the Palace...
 And some photos of the Palace itself...

 That's a golden statue of Mary on the top there....beautiful


Of course there is a lot of history intertwined with the Palace of Popes, and the city itself. What I took away was that there was a total of 9 popes who stayed here, 2 being slightly more significant historically than the others. For some popes, this was a "summer house", and others lived here primarily and swore they were THE pope, fighting for power against the king and the other popes living in other parts of Europe. Yeah, sometimes there would be 3 popes.
Organ inside of the little Cathedral connected to the Palace

Basically, a lot went on here, even though this isn't really a "pop" historic place. Very cool stuff! Of course parts here and there have been ruined. Soldiers who where stationed here ruined a lot of stuff, like chipping faces off of the wall murals and selling them. I wasn't allowed to take pictures of the head-less murals, for the museum's fear my camera flash would do further damage, ha.
Above: Proof of my existence. Note to self: Buy gloves. Stop making sweater udders with your cold fists.
                      Above:  Theatre! They have a world wide theater festival every July.
                        Above: Rock formation and pond made inside of it!
                                        Above: I spot the rare French-Robot Scarecrow.

After a nice long day we headed home to have the typical 8pm dinner with our French families. Of course we drove by plenty of vineyards.
We chased the sunset home, and it was beautiful.

Ahh. Time to rest!

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